Editing articles

Ask questions and discuss topics of interest related to the FamilySearch wiki found at http://wiki.familysearch.org.

Moderator: ForbesMM

Locked
Anne-p40
New Member
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Mar 04, 2008 4:14 pm

Editing articles

#1

Post by Anne-p40 »

I haven't had a good experience editing articles. Two that I recently did resulted in the authors saying I shouldn't have done what I did. I feel I was justified yet the authors weren't receptive.

I wonder if there will be a lot of "thick skinned" editors who ignore the comments made by the authors? If we are going to require a statement in the summary box about what was changed, and especially justification for the change, we have to make sure that all editors understand this.
The_Earl
Member
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2007 9:12 am

#2

Post by The_Earl »

Anne wrote:I haven't had a good experience editing articles. Two that I recently did resulted in the authors saying I shouldn't have done what I did. I feel I was justified yet the authors weren't receptive.

I wonder if there will be a lot of "thick skinned" editors who ignore the comments made by the authors? If we are going to require a statement in the summary box about what was changed, and especially justification for the change, we have to make sure that all editors understand this.
Wikipedia handles this in a few ways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_summary

1. Wikipedia reverts any changes that do not match the summary. This is a simple way to 'train' editors, and prevent spam, since it makes moderators jobs easier. If a moderator can't quickly resolve the summary and the changes, the change gets reverted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_war

2. Talk pages. Contested pages are often modified on the 'discussion' tab first, then when consensus is reached, the change is made to the main page. This is especially useful when an editor wants to make a change but is unsure of the impact or wording. This is also mandatory for pages that have 'edit wars' where two editors go back and forth over a change. Wikipedia locks the main threads for these pages, and forces edits to the talk page. Moderators then move uncontested changes to the main page.

So:

I think we need a policy requiring edit summaries. We should also mark and lock pages that are contested.

To answer your question:
Yes there will be editors that do not respect the policy of the wiki. There are a number of ways to deal with that. The least intrusive would be to revert that persons changes if indicated, and post a note to the user's talk page as to why. Other solutions include page locking, and user banning. I would hope to not need much user banning :).

The Earl
Thomas_Lerman
Member
Posts: 172
Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2008 9:54 am

#3

Post by Thomas_Lerman »

Obviously, I did not see the exchange of comments for the article so my comments here in this thread may not have any relavance. The authors, editors, moderators, etc. should have a certain amount of humility, kindness, and tolerance. If someone just gets comments back saying "You should not have done that", "You did it all wrong", "You were wrong", or anything else like that without further explanation, that would deter people from contributing. If someone does something wrong or incorrect, we should all try to be kind and constructive.

With all that said, as The Earl said, this will occasionally happen. Many people are used to being silo builders and feel like they own the article they contributed. As RicheyMT pointed out in a user's group meeting, we do not want to go "us against them" from either direction, but rather "them against the best practices". I believe this goes in both directions. If someone contributes something, follows the best practices, and the information is true & valid, they have every right to do so. The author may need to be pointed to best practices to know that others have the right to edit the article. The Earl also enumerated some of the things that can be done to help. Obviously, others will need to know about the situation if it gets out of hand.
The_Earl
Member
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2007 9:12 am

#4

Post by The_Earl »

Anne wrote:I haven't had a good experience editing articles. Two that I recently did resulted in the authors saying I shouldn't have done what I did. I feel I was justified yet the authors weren't receptive.
A contributing factor is the lack of clear policy on the FS Wiki. I have run into a few situations myself where I was 'violating' some unpublished policy. I hope that we can get some of these things written up and published so that when these situations come up, we can point people to the policy, and enforce them.

Thanks
The Earl
User avatar
daddy-o-p40
Member
Posts: 237
Joined: Wed Feb 21, 2007 1:22 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

#5

Post by daddy-o-p40 »

Hey everyone,

I'd like the opportunity to participate here. Just don't have enough info to know what this is entirely about.
"What have I done for someone today?" Thomas Monson
RitcheyMT
Member
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Mar 05, 2008 7:33 am

#6

Post by RitcheyMT »

Anne wrote:I haven't had a good experience editing articles. Two that I recently did resulted in the authors saying I shouldn't have done what I did. I feel I was justified yet the authors weren't receptive.

I wonder if there will be a lot of "thick skinned" editors who ignore the comments made by the authors? If we are going to require a statement in the summary box about what was changed, and especially justification for the change, we have to make sure that all editors understand this.
This may be our first edit war, which is a good thing, because I'd rather learn how to deal with it now than when we have 50k users starting 150 edit wars. So part of what we need to answer here is "How do I, as an editor, submit a case for mediation?" We need a process for this, and maybe some functionality we don't yet have. I agree also that we need policies, but they're going to take time to generate, and having a mediator in place actually doing the work of mediating might help generate some of the ideas we need for the editing (and mediation) policies/best practices.
The_Earl
Member
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2007 9:12 am

#7

Post by The_Earl »

ritcheymt wrote:This may be our first edit war, which is a good thing, because I'd rather learn how to deal with it now than when we have 50k users starting 150 edit wars. So part of what we need to answer here is "How do I, as an editor, submit a case for mediation?" We need a process for this, and maybe some functionality we don't yet have. I agree also that we need policies, but they're going to take time to generate, and having a mediator in place actually doing the work of mediating might help generate some of the ideas we need for the editing (and mediation) policies/best practices.
It may help to better identify users that can set / enforce policy vs users that are 'peers'. The forum uses the badge to identify church employees, maybe we need a template similar for the wiki user pages.

I have signed up for a few of the moderator training tasks. I have not had time to get to them yet, but I hope to get them started soon.

Thanks
The Earl
Locked

Return to “FamilySearch Wiki”